Backbone-News

Until last Friday, Cogent and TeliaSonera were in a bilateral peering relationship, meaning they exchanged traffic between their networks for free.

By what is known at the moment, it looks like Cogent is at the origin of the problem. They have decided to end the peering agreement no longer exchange traffic with TeliaSonera. The consequence is that people with Cogent only connectivity are no longer able to connect to sites on teh telia network, and vice-versa.

There is no official word yet from Cogent, but Telia has informed their customers and blames Cogent. Funny enough they basically recommend to their Transit customers to buy additional Upstream from a second ISP to get around the issue. Interesting approach.

It isn’t the first time that Cogent finds itself in a peering fight. In 2005 Level3 de-peered Cogent, the same year OpenTransit de-peered Cogent and I could continue to go on.

It shows unfortunately yet again one thing: Don’t rely on a single provider if you want reliable connectivity! get multihomed to at least to different Transit providers!

We will provide you with more updates on the current situation as soon as further details appear.

Further coverage:
GigaOm
Nanog

Everybody who has tried to get floorspace in one of the many facilities in London, will be aware that there is a huge demand and not a lot of available free space. As a consequence the prices are rather high.
Telehouse Europe has announced today an investment of £80 million in a new build, which will almost double its London Docklands data centre facilities.
The new location will be an 8-storey, 12,000 m2 state-of-the-art data centre, named Telehouse South, adjacent to its two existing data centres (Telehouse North and Telehouse East) in the heart of London’s Docklands. It should be operational by 2010.
John Souter, CEO of LINX (London Internet Exchange), welcomed the announcement, saying: “Telehouse’s major investment reaffirms London’s pre-eminence as a world class centre for communications interconnect.” LINX is already located at the existing Telehouse Data Centres in London.

Global Crossing (NASDAQ: GLBC) reported today its consolidated financial and operational results for the fourth quarter and full year 2007.

• Consolidated revenue grew 4 percent sequentially to $616 million in the fourth quarter.
• Company generated $323 million or 52 percent adjusted gross margin in the fourth quarter.
• Consolidated revenue grew to $2.26 billion in 2007.
• Company generated $174 million in adjusted cash EBITDA for 2007.

Read the press release for further details.

Level 3 Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:LVLT) announced that Kevin O’Hara, one of the founders, is stepping down as the company’s president and chief operating officer, effective immediately.
Neil Hobbs, currently executive vice president, sales and network services, has been appointed to the newly created position of executive vice president, operations. Neil Hobbs and Jim Crowe (CEO) will be assuming Kevin O’Hara’s responsibilities going forward. Jim Crowe will assume the additional title of president.

Sunit Patel will continue in the role of chief financial officer. This comes partly as a suprise, as Level3 announced in October last year that they were beginning the search of a new CFO.

As part of the internal finance organization changes, the company appointed Neel Dev to the new position of senior vice president, finance with responsibility for financial planning, budgeting and analysis for operations and the company’s customer facing market groups.

Cogent Communications reported on their blog that they are continuing to grow their network coverage in Europe. New countries added to their network footprint include:

Ireland: Dublin

Italy: Arezzo, Bologna, Florence, Rome, and Venice/Padua

Finland: Helsinki
Norway: Oslo
Sweden: Malmo

Czech Republic: Prague
Hungary: Budapest
Romania: Bucharest
Slovakia: Bratislava

Especially the cities in Eastern Europe show the recent trend of most of the major international Service Providers moving further into the eastern European countries, which have become a popular outsourcing region for many multinational corporations and which see a massive growth over the last years.

Click here to see their updated network map.

Shortly after having announced that nLayer chose the MX960 platform to extend/upgrade their network, Juniper adds another high profile Service Provider which has chosen the MX960 router. Carphone Warehouse (CPW) is providing connectivity to more then 1.5 million households in the UK, the largest part through AOL UK which CPW acquired last year.

CPW is using the MX960 as part of their NGN (Next Generation Network) in the UK which extends to 70% of UK households already.

Read more in the press-release.